My favorite keyboard shortcut (Cycle VPN)
I use Mullvad VPN[1] on my daily driving devices (my phone, my laptop, and my PC). I am pretty much always connected to it when browsing the web.
One of the consequences of this is that a lot of sites will break in different ways. It might be obvious, like Reddit being cute with an error page (I've considered writing a browser extension that deletes their annoying copy), or it might be secretive and wait until a transaction is almost complete to silently fail. Either way, I frequently have to cycle my VPN connection, and Mullvad makes it easy with a single reconnect command and button in the GUI. However, easy is not good enough, because sometimes I have to cycle several times - I think once I cycled over a dozen times to load a Reddit post. Ideally, it should be frictionless. My perfect workflow would be automated - as soon as I hit a browsing error that's definitely caused by the VPN, Mullvad would start reconnecting and retrying until the request succeeds. However, that would be a significant challenge to engineer.
So the second best thing is to just make it even easier to cycle my connection. I simply created a custom keyboard shortcut (In Linux Mint with Cinnamon, the Keyboard application has easy entry for custom shortcuts) to run mullvad reconnect. This sounds trivial writing it out, but it is honestly one of my favorite little DIY tech tricks. Switching to the Mullvad GUI app and clicking reconnect and switching back to the browser to check if it works now is surprisingly a lot of friction - before I came up with the shortcut, sometimes I would just give up after a few cycles. But the shortcut means I never have to change my focus - either in the application sense or in the mental, personal sense. Cycling the VPN has switched from "a separate action that interrupts my flow" to simply "part of the flow of web browsing".
I don't know if there are conventions around what keys to assign to custom shortcuts. I assigned 2 sets for this shortcut, because my laptop keyboard is condensed. Super + Home is very easy to remember and type on my desktop, but is less ergonomic on my laptop, where I use Super + Alt + Backspace. Both shortcuts are assigned on both computers though so that the space is permanently reserved.
So that's my favorite keyboard shortcut. Super + Home runs mullvad reconnect and it makes web browsing privacy that much more frictionless.
[1] I'll soon expand on why I use Mullvad and what I think of it soon on my /uses page. The short answer is: I think digital life is inescapably spoiled in 2026, and there are no good options for engaging with it, but I have the fewest qualms about Mullvad and of course I use a VPN all the time: My ISP would sell my true browsing history if I didn't.